The kingdom of Essex was conquered with equal facility, and the East Angles, from their hatred of the Mercian government, which had been established over them by treachery and violence, and probably exercised with tyranny, immediately rose in arms and craved the protection of Egbert.  Bernulf, the Mercian King, who marched against them, was defeated and slain; and two years after, Ludican, his successor, met with the same fate.  These insurrections and calamities facilitated the enterprises of Egbert, who advanced into the centre of the Mercian territories and made easy conquests over a dispirited and divided people.  In order to engage them more easily to submission, he allowed Wiglef, their countryman, to retain the title of king, while he himself exercised the real powers of sovereignty.  The anarchy which prevailed in Northumberland tempted him to carry still further his victorious arms; and the inhabitants, unable to resist his power, and desirous of possessing some established form of government, were forward, on his first appearance, to send deputies, who submitted to his authority and swore allegiance to him as their sovereign.  Egbert, however, still allowed to Northumberland, as he had done to Mercia and East Anglia, the power of electing a king, who paid him tribute and was dependent on him.

Thus were united all the kingdoms of the heptarchy in one great state, near four hundred years after the first arrival of the Saxons in Britain; and the fortunate arms and prudent policy of Egbert at last effected what had been so often attempted in vain by so many princes.  Kent, Northumberland, and Mercia, which had successfully aspired to general dominion, were now incorporated in his empire; and the other subordinate kingdoms seemed willingly to share the same fate.  His territories were nearly of the same extent with what is now properly called England; and a favorable prospect was afforded to the Anglo-Saxons of establishing a civilized monarchy, possessed of tranquillity within itself, and secure against foreign invasion.  This great event happened in the year 827.

The Saxons, though they had been so long settled in the island, seem not as yet to have been much improved beyond their German ancestors, either in arts, civility, knowledge, humanity, justice, or obedience to the laws.  Even Christianity, though it opened the way to connections between them and the more polished states of Europe, had not hitherto been very effectual in banishing their ignorance or softening their barbarous manners.  As they received that doctrine through the corrupted channels of Rome, it carried along with it a great mixture of credulity and superstition, equally destructive to the understanding and to morals.  The reverence toward saints and relics seems to have almost supplanted the adoration of the Supreme Being; monastic observances were esteemed more meritorious than the active virtues; the knowledge of natural causes was neglected, from the universal belief of